


the fire sermon

by findingkairos



Series: to you I gift the end of things [4]
Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Actually Gods AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Blood God Technoblade (Video Blogging RPF), Canon-Typical Violence, Fantasy, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Loyalty, Phil Watson-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Platonic Relationships, Technoblade-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Winged Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Worldbuilding, aetwt, cosmic horror, the Execution stream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:42:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28928976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos/pseuds/findingkairos
Summary: In the beginning there was two: a god, and his angel.Everyone thinks the nicknames “Blood God” and “Angel of Death” are just that: nicknames.And they are, until a small world's admins and mortals, whose lives are mere blips in the bigger scheme of things, try to play god while actual gods and angels walk among them.
Relationships: Technoblade & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF)
Series: to you I gift the end of things [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2104326
Comments: 44
Kudos: 831
Collections: Completed stories I've read, MCYT, The Reasons For My Insomnia





	the fire sermon

**Author's Note:**

> ( _joyous teeth that glint in starlight_ — with the moon in hand I’ll bring you the sun)
> 
> Inspired by a Tumblr post wondering: [if Philza _created_ Minecraft, and he is the angel of death - then who sits above him?](https://wwwwwelcomegays.tumblr.com/post/640990948751458304/wwwwwelcomegays-wwwwwelcomegays-ok-but-like-if)
> 
> EDIT: MIS MADE ME ART OF THE BLOOD GOD PLEASE [GO SEND THEM SOME LOVE IT'S SO GOOD](https://renvember.tumblr.com/post/642074399032459264/blood-for-the-blood-god-am-i-right-ladies-this)

_In the beginning there was two: a god, and his angel._

* * *

There is a shift in the air.

Phil lifts his head, then bends it back over his work. Reorganizing chests take time, and he’s since learned to appreciate the slow and steady work. It’s not all that different from the macro-scale of things, really.

Fundy knocks on his door. Phil tucks away the last bits of glass panes and walks over to open it. But it’s not just the fox at the door who push their way in without regard for him; there is Quackity, and Tubbo, and Ranboo too.

“What’s going on?” Phil asks, even though he knows what is happening. The stink wafts from them, noticeable even without the draft of wind from the door. They are bloody and looking for blood.

It’s the only reason why he lets them find the compass. Phil doesn’t need it to find where it points to, and besides—this is the most interesting thing that’s happened since his arrival to the server.

The ankle monitor is quaint and cute. He makes the necessary noises of complaint and unhappiness before he puts it on. The four who call themselves the Butcher Army are no army, and they might have the armor and weapons and equipment that would allow them to arrest and kill a mortal man—

But the one they are going after isn’t mortal, no matter what he might like to pretend when he gets bored.

Phil reaches out, flexes the small amount of power he has still available to him when he’s confined himself to this form. _They’re coming for you, old friend_ , he says, and smiles when he can practically feel Techno’s surprise-curiosity flare. It tastes like oranges, bright and citrus.

_Who? How many?_

_Four in netherite. L’Manberg cabinet politicians. Techno, they have fully netherite weapons._

_It won’t matter_ , Techno says, and Phil’s smile turns into a grin. _I’ll be waiting for them_.

* * *

_And in those times, there was no need for names. They were unnecessary in such small communities where everyone knew everyone; existence together was enough._

_But in the long years since, after walking among those they have breathed life into, they have named themselves._

* * *

Of all the people on this small world, Phil is the one who knows the most about what Techno is capable of. He remembers the olden days before small worlds turned into large worlds and then became individual crossroads of the universe; he remembers the southern pole of a small planet crafted solely to be conquered. He remembers just how devastating Techno is in a fight, whether it’s one versus one or one versus many.

Which is why it surprises him to see Techno following the Butcher Army, quietly, placidly. He has no armor. He has no weapons. His expression is blank and impossible to read.

Phil is confused, until he spots Quackity riding a horse. _The_ horse. Carl.

 _Don’t you dare_ , Techno tells him. Phil can’t see the slanting of his eyes from here but he doesn’t need to; Techno’s attention is heavy, blanketing his shoulders, warm and soft.

He doesn’t sound angry. Phil winces. _How badly did they fuck up?_

 _They threatened Carl_ , Techno says with absolute serenity, _and then they threatened to set fire to the turtle farm._

Oh. _Oh_. There are few things that Techno had put care into in this small world, and his horses and turtles are some of them.

Phil throws open the doors of his balcony and sits down on the edge, legs dangling. The president of this burning country yells at him and tells him to go back inside. He ignores it to trace the line of the tower with his eyes, spot the anvil at the top.

It would be the work of moments—split seconds—to remove it. To brush it aside with one of his wings, breathe some life into it, shove it off course, tap along its edges until he finds the humming spot that will shatter it in one ringing blow.

Phil does none of this. Instead he sits and waits and watches as Techno is shoved into the cage, becoming yet another hybrid player treated like a mob. This is far from what he’d meant when he’d created the universe, the game and its players and the sandbox they build up and tear down each other in, but: this is what he’d intended. Freedom to be as kind and as cruel to each other as they wanted to be.

 _Not yet_ , Techno says. He looks up, lips pulled back into a snarl, carrying on a conversation—no, a _lecture_ —to the inhabitants of this sham country of how they are treating one of their own—

Oh. He’s angry about Phil. About the ankle monitor and the house arrest that Tubbo is still screaming about.

_Why didn’t you tell me about the shackles, Phil?_

_It wasn’t relevant_ , Phil tries, even though he knows that Techno will scowl.

And scowl he does, carrying on two separate conversations with the ease of long millennia of practice. _They tried to cage you._

_You know as well as I do that nothing they try will ever matter._

_And yet_. Techno finishes the mortal’s side of the conversation and turns to look Phil in the eye from meters and centimeters and universes away. _That’s not the point_.

The point is that no one tries anything like this and gets away with it. The point is that L’Manberg and the SMP are not the only actors here tonight.

 _Keep an eye out for him_ , Techno tells him, and Phil nods and rises to his feet.

* * *

_The angel did what angels do: he spread his wings and made something out of nothing. He crafted dirt and stone and plants and animals and breathed life into all that walked the earth or swam the seas or flew the skies, and he called it good._

_This, he created for his own pleasure, and that of his companion. For all gods and angels could create, and each crafted as it pleased them, and yet companionship was still considered the most sacred creation of all._

* * *

They don’t have to wait long. Punz the mercenary shows up, placing down TNT that the L’Manberg politicians freak out about. The admin of this small world lingers a small distance away and slips away with Carl in the chaos.

Phil keeps an eye on him as he goes. Dream thinks himself a manipulator, a chess master, a mastermind; he will not go far. Not while there is still a situation to be taking advantage of.

In the middle of the chaos, Quackity pulls the execution lever early. There is no trial, no reading of accusations, no opportunity for the accused to defend themselves. The Butcher Army pauses mid-fight, watching out of the corner of their eyes, elation on their faces in anticipation of their moment—

And then the anvil shatters into a thousand burning pieces that rain over the audience, and Techno raises his hand and rends the cage asunder with a flick of his fingers, and he steps forward into silence.

“Did you really think that you could kill me?” he asks, and Phil doesn’t need to be down there on the stage to taste the Butcher Army’s fear. It stinks in the same way that their thirst for violence had, with an additional astringent aftertaste that leaves him wanting water. He doesn’t move from his spot, doesn’t leave for a moment.

The admin of the small world makes his reappearance, riding Carl. He has a mask, there is no expression to read off the face, but Phil can taste the surprise and trepidation anyway.

“And _you_.”

Technoblade turns. He steps down from the execution stage with a stride so even that it looks as though he is gliding. Out of everyone here, only Phil knows how close it gets to the truth.

“You thought you could play me?” Techno sounds amused, all bone-deep tranquil rage swept away. Phil flexes his fingers, plays with his fire, wonders when the signal will come. “Oh, but you reveal everything about yourself to anyone who cares to look, Dream.”

“How did you survive?” the Butcher Army is crying. They are splintering. Some are twisting around to raise their weapons at this small world’s admin and his mercenary; others are backing up, leveling crossbows at Technoblade.

Technoblade—no. The blood god ignores them. “You’re hidden, sure. You have no friends, no allies, no pets. No connections.” No _blood_ , he does not say, but he is turning slowly now: figure taller, teeth sharper, cloak warping, magic humming. The sun is directly overhead but his shadow grows, and grows, and grows. “You are an admin— _the_ admin of this server—and you can teleport, and summon any material, and manipulate this small world as you please. But tell me something, Dream.”

Dream does not dismount from Carl. He stares up at the blood god, who is slowly but surely shifting into his true form. “What?” he asks, and there is an undercurrent of tightly compressed panic in his voice.

“Can you manipulate the real gods? Can you try and—heh— _predict_ us?”

The blood god’s voice—ha. Phil relaxes his wings, feels the humming stroke his feathers. Suppressing the top harmonics this early, instead of letting it rupture their eardrums? The blood god must be feeling merciful.

“You flaunted your powers,” the blood god says kindly. “You thought our titles were an inside joke.”

But woe to them—they might play at being gods, and be gods of their servers and small worlds, but there are true gods who walk among them.

“Unfortunately for you, we were there when the first stars were lit, and we will be here when the last of them flicker out.”

The blood god spreads his burning hands. Philza drops the burden of compressing himself. He spreads his wings, pulls one and two and five and ten and more out of the mortal shell, brings them down from the different planes of existence, and finally lets the shackles disintegrate.

One, then two, then four, then six—the Butcher Army and their SMP enemies—turn their heads at the flare of light. In that moment of distraction, Philza calls his flaming sword to hand and descends from the balcony, and the admin’s fear is sweet on his tongue.

The world sighs at last. Dream was smited by the Angel of Death, it murmurs, and the silence rings.

* * *

_And their relationship was thus: the blood god would call, and the angel of death would answer, for the real gods—the true gods—have existed since before the creation of the universe and all known things._

* * *

“Philza,” the blood god calls, and the angel goes. Of course he does. There is nowhere else he would rather be than by the side of the god he’d chosen, and he feels something in him loosen when he’s in a position for them to watch each other’s backs again, as unnecessary as that is.

“ _Phil?_ ” Quackity is wide-eyed. Fundy mouths something, but he is voiceless. Ranboo is twitching, looking away, at anywhere but at Philza. Tubbo gawks, like he had heard the stories but had never believed them or had imagined something else.

“You call him the Angel of Death,” the blood god says with gleaming teeth. “Where did you think he got that reputation from?”

Philza smiles, and blinks his many eyes, and sighs at the freedom of finally letting his flames shake loose. The stone beneath their feet is cast in light.

Technoblade is the god of blood in all its forms: of the violence, of the sacrifice, of the covenant. Philza is the angel of death, and the moniker in the modern tongue doesn’t mention the entirety of his domain. He could ascend, if he wanted to—but that would mean leaving Techno behind.

The sky yawns open above them. Ah. The blood god is feeling generous, then, if he is keeping it at that.

“He _created the universe_ ,” Tubbo breathes, staring in awful wonder at the sight of fire and stars spread throughout the once-noon sky. “And—and even though he did that—”

“He’s my right-hand man, yeah,” the blood god says, and Philza flutters his wings. He can’t help it. Theirs is not a relationship filled with verbal affirmations, not like that of other gods and their angels, but the blood god is always terrifyingly sincere when he indulges. “I gotta say, you really should have noticed when we took over the world that first time.”

Oh, Philza remembers that. It had been a fleeting but memorable few months. “I still think,” he says when a thought occurs to him, “that we should have taught that child a lesson.”

“Who, Arlus?” The blood god snorts, and hums, and the upper and lower tones shift in pitch in his true form’s version of laughter. “You didn’t consider his nation’s annexation by the German Empire to be punishment enough?”

“No.” Philza still remembers, too, the laughter that had bubbled up in Technoblade’s chest when the admins and players of that small world had banded together and decried them for accomplishing the goal of the server within the first week of its existence. It’d been the only reason why he hadn’t smited them all on the spot.

“You always were the more chaotic and bloodthirsty one of the two of us,” the blood god notes fondly, and Philza brushes his wings over the blood god’s back, laces them together with the god’s shadows.

“Their harrier strikes were fun.” They’d been nothing like a true smiting, not even on the level of striking down targets with his flame or light or sword, but it had been funny to see them all look up into the sky, eyes wide, waiting for the end.

“People died in fear and pain,” Tubbo says. Right, he had been on that small world too, hadn’t he? Their Empire had never gone to war with them, though. Philza flutters his wings, tossing embers in thought. What had Tubbo’s faction been called again?

“You respawned, like you do here.” The blood god chuckles, his overtones momentarily undampened in his mirth. People wince, but it’s only a little bit of holy humming that’s unfit for mortal ears, they’ll be fine. “And, ah. Speaking of.”

The mercenary is long gone, and so it is that Dream shows up alone, pale beneath the mask and trembling. That might have been his first long death on the server. How fitting.

“How fitting,” the blood god tells Philza, in tune with him as he always is. “That the first one you struck down when you finally pulled out your wings is the one who’d tried to ban you from them on this server.”

“I know, right?” Philza smiles. The admin blanches. Still, he stays his ground. At least there’s still some hope for them to make a proper admin out of him yet.

“We yield,” Dream rasps. His knees are shaking, he is without armor and weapon. Not that they’d help him here. “We yield. Please, don’t—”

“Don’t what?” Philza snorts. “Erase the world? Mate, you built it. You’re its admin. This is what I wanted for you when I created the game and crafted your kind: free will, to raise each other up.”

“And to tear them down,” the blood god notes. “It’s what I was championing, even before L’Manberg called me here for their little revolution.”

Philza blinks his many eyes, tries to peer beyond this plane and into the next. “I thought you did that because you were bored?”

“Well, that too.” The blood god’s true form is on display and there is no beginning nor end to him, no shoulders to watch for a shrug, but he projects the emotion-impression of it anyway. The shadows curl and the bones clack and the holy fires whisper. “Look, I can multi-task, alright?”

He can. He really can. Philza shuffles his wings, pens in the mortals slowly trying to edge away, settles feathers sharp enough to slice open an interplanar path in between Quackity and Carl. They aren’t quite finished with these children yet.

* * *

_And although the rest of the realms, and the very world they’d created, had forgotten them: the universe has not. The other gods and angels have not._

_Their power has never wavered in all the millennia since, and at the time at which I tell this story to you—I rather doubt that their power ever will._

* * *

“And?” Confronted with the fact that the piglin player they’d so happily tried to execute is, in fact, a god, the admin and the Butcher Army seem uncertain. “So what happens now?”

“Now you live with the knowledge,” Philza tells them, and drags the quills of his feathers over the edges of this plane when they turn to look at him. They chime, and it’s satisfying, listening to the music of the realms again. He’s been concealed and shifted in that mortal shell for so long, he might just remain in his true form for the next little while. “Nothing else changes, really. So go on, have your fun. Wage your wars, build your countries. Just remember: don’t try and play god.”

 _We already have that job_ , he does not say, but he rather thinks that they get the message anyway.

* * *

_Which is why we don’t call upon them anymore, or imitate them. Remember the Antarctic Empire? The potatoes? Agriculture and war; creation and destruction. We thank the gods that Technoblade and Philza didn’t do more damage than what they have, and if they’re included in that pantheon—_

_Well. What other server can say that they’ve played home to gods?_

**Author's Note:**

> I like to headcanon that Technoblade's—the blood god's—true voice ends up with many overtones that hum and harmonize, like in [overtone singing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone_singing). For a demonstration by a professional, [here's a YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9Qh709gas).
> 
> More of my recent work can be found at my [root pseud](https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos). Thanks for reading this one.
> 
> * * *
> 
> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including:
> 
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